RCA 630TS - Modified with Motor
 

I got this set today at an estate sale for $20. The owner had been an electrical engineer and had a lot of home-made electronics including audio equipment and computer items.

This set appears to have had a lot of modifications done to it. An electric motor was added as well as some additional controls and connectors on the chassis. Would this have been for a mechanical color wheel? I assume there would have needed to be an additional control chassis for that. There were a several custom built chassis at the sale, something may have been for this set, but by the time I bought it a lot of the stuff had already been sold. There were projects there that appear to have never been finished, maybe this was one of them. I haven't yet removed the chassis to see what was modified underneath. The motor has a multi-conductor cable that leaves the set.

Cabinet is in OK condition for age, but is missing the safety glass and top clip for the glass. CRT is a 10FP4.


-- Max

Additional photo.

Looks to me like it was modified for a color wheel. Yes, a control chassis would be needed for the motor.

You can see the wheel position sensor in the last picture.

That would be pretty cool to find the rest of the color wheel adapter and put it back together. What are your plans for the set?

It would be relatively easy to make it work. You'd need a new wheel, which could be made, and a servo circuit to control the motor speed. Then you'd need an Aurora standards converter from Darryl Hock.

BEcause of the blue coil wrapped around the flyback transformer and the modified relay coil for a position sensor pickup, I'll say this was a Colordaptor conversion. With a color wheel you can probably make this "color" set work again by looking through the Colordaptor pages at the ETF website: http://www.earlytelevision.org/search.html Lots of images and information here.
Type colordaptor into the search blank and about 6 different articles will appear.

One of them has a .pdf of the entire colordaptor manual which you can download.

Besy luck!

Old friend of mine built this one back in the day. His daughter donated it to the Museum after he passed on. They actually got it working at one point.
http://www.earlytelevision.org/colordaptor.html

I've seen a lot of vintage TV's over the years, but sets with that conversion are extremely uncommon and part of television history. It would be great to restore it as a color-wheel set, or sell it to someone, or a museum, who has the means to do it. Very cool find.

Nice catch, Cliff. You are right, this set was modified for NTSC color, not CBS color.

The winding on the flyback would be used for gating the color burst. Don't know off the top of my head if Colordaptor used this or some other method.

I always thought these were really cool. Am I right in thinking that if you got the required parts you could build one today? I think it would be a fun project.

Yes you can still build one. Servo circuits may need to be tweaked or improvised since 50's motors for that purpose are not likely easy to find.

A number of folks have made ones from scratch in the last decade or two.

If I found one half built like that I'd finish the job of adding the wheel.

When I finally restore a 40's 10-12" set that I like enough to keep I'll probably build a wheel type converter too. I've heard of someone making a small "personal viewer" type color wheel built into goggles on a long tether to the set.....Those would be cool to build, easy to store, and would not obscure the face of a set....

Thank you for the information on this set. For now I plan to keep it as a display item as a piece of electronics history. Unfortunately I don't have the time right now to try and make it an operational color set. I may decide to sell it in the future, it would be nice to see it working again.

I will try to post some additional photos under the chassis soon. I don't know if the owner ever finished the color conversion. I did not see a color wheel at the sale. There were several custom built chassis that may have been used with the set, but I wasn't able to identify them. The motor currently has a multi-conductor cable attached with bare wire ends, so it wasn't set up to just plug into something.

If you ever decide to sell I can tell you I would be interested in buying. I have always wanted to get one of these working